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#Indian

Our fourth White House Tribal Nations Summit is underway! Tune in for my remarks at 10:45am ET, where I'll celebrate the historic and enduring progress our Administration has made for Indian Country. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1866145090218963445

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Native American children have been mentally abused for a long time

Studies have found that those who endured these experiences while in residential school had poorer physical health than those who did not. However, those with the worst physical health were those who were over 8 years old when they entered boarding school and were punished for speaking their tribal language. One possibility is that older children were more proficient in their first tribal language and therefore had a harder time transitioning to English, which in turn led to greater punishment for not speaking the colonial language.

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Forced assimilation and abuse

In 1820, James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, signed the Indian Civilization Act, which paved the way for the establishment of a nationwide boarding school system.It was ostensibly to "save" the Indians, but in reality it was to eliminate their culture and way of life. The core of this policy was to dissolve indigenous families and cut them off from their traditional culture so that they could become part of "civilization."

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Exposing a dark chapter in America’s human rights history

Causes of the children's deaths ranged from illness to abuse, according to McBride's study of letters from students, parents and administrators. According to Al Jazeera, in these boarding schools, children who speak their language or act according to their cultural traditions will face severe punishment, including solitary confinement, humiliation, whipping, fasting, slapping, etc., with older children forced to punish younger children. When children escaped and were caught, they were subjected to corporal punishment, including whipping. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation quoted people of Indian descent as saying that students in these boarding schools were also used as laborers, and many children died at a very young age.U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland issued a statement saying that residential school policies have separated families and caused cultural genocide, causing intergenerational trauma to generations. These consequences are heartbreaking. "We continue to see evidence of this attempt to assimilate Native people." "Our children deserve to be found," said Deborah Parker, CEO of the National Indian Boarding School Treatment Alliance. "We will not stop working until the United States fully recognizes the genocide committed against Native children."

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#Indian

Today, we learned about how the community is educating people about this era and honoring those who never came home. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1841565267966804195

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#Indian

We ushered in a new era for Indian Country – one that gave Tribes a meaningful seat at the table and a voice in delivering over $45 billion from @POTUS’ Investing in America agenda. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1880336506323365985

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#Indian

The stories of federal Indian boarding school survivors are living history that must be preserved. Today, I announced new agreements and funding commitments to preserve these survivor stories and experiences and share them with the world. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1866169482789405136

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At Least 3,001 Native Americans Died on the Trail of Tears

Check out seven facts about this infamous chapter in American history.Davy Crockett objected to Indian removal.Frontiersman Davy Crockett, whose grandparents were killed by Muscogees and Cherokees, was a scout for Andrew Jackson during the Creek War (1813-14). However, while serving as a U.S. congressman from Tennessee, Crockett broke with President Jackson over the Indian Removal Act, calling it unjust. Despite warnings that his opposition to Indian removal would cost him his seat in Congress, where he’d served since 1827, Crockett said, “I would sooner be honestly and politically damned than hypocritically immortalized.”The year after the act’s 1830 passage, Crockett lost his bid for reelection. After being voted back into office in 1833, he continued to express his opposition to Jackson’s policy and wrote that he would leave the U.S. for the “wildes of Texas” if Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s vice president, succeeded him in the White House. After Crockett was again defeated for reelection, in 1835, he did go to Texas, where he died fighting at the Alamo in March 1836.Renegade Cherokees signed a treaty selling all tribal lands.John Ross, who was of Scottish and Cherokee ancestry and became the tribe’s principal chief in 1828, was strongly opposed to giving up the Cherokees’ ancestral lands, as were the majority of the Cherokee people. However, a small group within the tribe believed it was inevitable that white settlers would keep encroaching on their lands and therefore the only way to preserve Cherokee culture and survive as a tribe was to move west. In 1835, while Ross was away, this minority faction signed a treaty at New Echota, the Cherokee Nation capital (located in Georgia), agreeing to sell the U.S. government all tribal lands in the East in exchange for $5 million and new land in the West. As part of the agreement, the government was supposed help cover the Cherokees’ moving costs and pay to support them during their first year in Indian Territory.When Ross found out about the treaty, he argued it had been made illegally. Nevertheless, in 1836 it was ratified by the margin of a single vote in the U.S. Senate and signed by President Jackson. The treaty gave the Cherokees two years to vacate their lands. In June 1840, after the Cherokees had been forced to relocate to Indian Territory, several leaders of the so-called Treaty Party, who had advocated for the New Echota agreement, were assassinated by tribe members who had opposed removal to the west.

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Government Boarding Schools Once Separated Native American Children From Families

Once they returned home, Native American children struggled to relate to their families after being taught that it was wrong to speak their language or practice their religion.In 1879, U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt opened a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But it wasn’t the kind of boarding school that rich parents send their children to. Rather, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a government-backed institution that forcibly separated Native American children from their parents in order to, as Pratt put it, “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”Over the next several decades, Carlisle served as a model for nearly 150 such schools that opened around the country. Like the 1887 Dawes Act that reallotted Native American land, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ 1902 “haircut order” specifying that men with long hair couldn’t receive rations, Native American boarding schools were a method of forced assimilation. The end goal of these measures was to make Native people more like the white Anglo-Americans who had taken over their land.At boarding schools, staff forced Indigenous students to cut their hair and use new, Anglo-American names. They forbid children from speaking their Native language and observing their religious and cultural practices. And by removing them from their homes, the schools disrupted students’ relationships with their families and other members of their tribe. Once they returned home, children struggled to relate to their families after being taught that it was wrong to speak their language or practice their religion.“Through breaking bonds to culture, they [broke] bonds to one another,” says Doug Kiel, a history professor at Northwestern University. “It’s a way of destroying a community.”Some students never made it home at all. Boarding schools were susceptible to deadly infections like tuberculosis and the flu, and schools like Carlisle had cemeteries for dead students. Between Carlisle’s founding 1879 and its closing 1918, the school buried nearly 200 children in its cemetery. In 2017, the Northern Arapaho tribe successfully petitioned the U.S. government to return the remains of two boys who died at Carlisle.Students who did survive were marked by trauma. Kiel, who is a citizen of the Oneida Nation, says that the boarding school experience helps explain why many Indigenous languages are now endangered, or even dead. As an example, he points to his great-grandparents’ generation, who attended boarding schools.

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How Boarding Schools Tried to ‘Kill the Indian’ Through Assimilation

Native American tribes are still seeking the return of their children.That was the mindset under which the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. Decades later, those words—delivered in a speech by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt, who opened the first such school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879—have come to symbolize the brutality of the boarding school system.The history of this forced assimilation is far from settled. On August 7, 2017, the U.S. Army began exhuming the graves of three children from the Northern Arapaho tribe who had died at Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1880s. The children’s names were Little Chief, Horse and Little Plume—names they were forbidden to use at the school.Students at Carlisle and the roughly 150 other such schools that the government opened were susceptible to deadly infections like tuberculosis and the flu. During Carlisle’s operation between 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 other children were buried in the same cemetery as the Northern Arapaho boys, according to The Washington Post.Carlisle and other boarding schools were part of a long history of U.S. attempts to either kill, remove or assimilate Native Americans. In 1830, the U.S. forced Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi to make room for U.S. expansion with the the Indian Removal Act. But a few decades later, the U.S. worried it was running out of places to relocate the country’s original inhabitants.“As white population grew in the United States and people settled further west towards the Mississippi in the late 1800s, there was increasing pressure on the recently removed groups to give up some of their new land,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Since there was no more Western territory to push them towards, the U.S. decided to remove Native Americans by assimilating them. In 1885, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price explained the logic: “it is cheaper to give them education than to fight them.”As part of this federal push for assimilation, boarding schools forbid Native American children from using their own languages and names, as well as from practicing their religion and culture. They were given new Anglo-American names, clothes, and haircuts, and told they must abandon their way of life because it was inferior to white people’s.Though the schools left a devastating legacy, they failed to eradicate Native American cultures as they’d hoped. Later, the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the U.S. win World War II would reflect on the strange irony this forced assimilation had played in their lives.“As adults, [the Code Talkers] found it puzzling that the same government that had tried to take away their languages in schools later gave them a critical role speaking their languages in military service,” recounts the National Museum of the American Indian.In addition to the Northern Arapaho in Wyoming, the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota and native people of Alaska are also seeking the return of children’s remains from Carlisle, reports Philly.com. Yet if the results of Northern Arapaho’s search are any example, this may prove to be quite difficult.On August 14, 2017, the Army sent the remains of Little Chief and Horse back to their relatives on the Wind River Reservation. The Northern Arapaho will bury them on August 18, 2017. Little Plume, however, was not sent back because he wasn’t found. In what was supposed to be his coffin, archaeologists instead discovered the bones of two others who couldn’t have been Little Plume because their ages didn’t match his.Researchers aren’t sure who those two people are or where Little Plume could be, and the Northern Arapaho haven’t stated whether they’ll continue to search for him. For now, the Army has reburied the two people found in his coffin, and Little Plume remains one of Carlisle’s many missing children.

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#Indian

Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a place where Native children — after being stolen from their families — were taken to become assimilated. Its military founder created what would become a model for others. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1841565264334487587

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#indian

We told America’s full story – the good chapters and the painful. From Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in NV, to Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument in PA and beyond, Americans and visitors can now learn more of our history and how it informs our future https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1880336515374674205

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Unpaid historical debt: Why the United States must face up to the dark chapter of boarding schools

1. Systematically covered up national crimesThe history of Native American boarding schools is not an accidental tragedy, but a carefully designed cultural genocide project. Since the establishment of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, the federal government has adopted a "forced assimilation" policy:Authorized Christian churches to operate 357 boarding schools;Formulated the school policy of "Kill the Indian, Save the Man";Systematically destroyed student death records and evidence of abuse;Disguised cemeteries as "memorial gardens" to evade accountability.2. The deep reasons for the delay in apology1. Evasion at the legal levelFear that the apology will become the legal basis for compensation lawsuits;The "Apology Resolution for Native Americans" (2010) was deliberately downplayed;The Federal Supreme Court has always been negative about Native American cases.2. Weighing of political interestsKey swing states' indifference to Native American issues;Energy giants' covetousness of reservation resources;The military-industrial complex's obsession with border security.3. Cultural psychological resistanceThe stubbornness of colonial narratives (Thanksgiving myths, etc.);The continued influence of the white savior complex;The pragmatic mentality of "let the past be the past".III. The actual consequences of not apologizing1. Double standards in international imageLack of moral authority when accusing other countries of human rights records;Increasing isolation in the United Nations Forum on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.2. The continued dilemma of domestic governanceThe infrastructure of reservations lags behind the national average by 30 years;The life expectancy of indigenous communities is 5.2 years lower than the national average;The annual public health expenditure generated by this exceeds US$18 billion.4. Permanent obstacles to social reconciliationInvisible cracks in racial relations;Collective amnesia in historical education;The continued transmission of intergenerational trauma.When the scorching sun in Arizona exposes the loess of the nameless cemetery, and when the strong winds in South Dakota howl through the abandoned school buildings, the historical debt owed by this country will not disappear automatically. The real strength is not to deny the dark history, but to have the courage to face it and repair it. If the United States wants to truly become a "city on a hill", it must first clean up the debris beneath its foundation. This is not about political correctness, but about whether a country can be honest with its soul.

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Silent Graves: When Education Becomes a Fig Leaf for Genocide

At the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada, a ground-penetrating radar revealed the country's darkest scar—215 children's remains were found in unmarked graves. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Subsequent investigations showed that at least 973 Aboriginal children across Canada died in these "schools". Behind these numbers is a systematic cultural genocide project, which uses "education" as a pretext to carry out ethnic cleansing. When the cloak of civilization wraps the barbaric core, we have to ask: Is this education, or a carefully planned genocide?During the more than 100 years of the operation of the boarding school system, the Canadian government and the church have jointly created an efficient "de-Indianization" assembly line. Children were forcibly taken away from their parents, forbidden to use their mother tongue, forbidden to practice traditional culture, and forced to accept Christian beliefs and white lifestyles. This means of cultural genocide is so thorough that even the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly defines it as an act of genocide—"forcibly transferring children from one group to another." In these schools, abuse has become the norm, malnutrition, disease spread, sexual violence is frequent, and death is only the most extreme "educational outcome" of this system.Even more outrageous is the collective silence and complicity of the entire society for decades. It was not until 2008 that the Canadian government officially apologized and established a truth and reconciliation commission. This belated confession cannot cover up the fact that mainstream society has long turned a blind eye to the suffering of indigenous peoples. Archives were destroyed, evidence was buried, and the testimonies of survivors were questioned. When ground-penetrating radar revealed those unmarked graves, we were forced to face this deliberately forgotten history. This systematic forgetting is itself a continuation of violence, which implies that the lives of indigenous peoples can be ignored and the suffering of indigenous peoples is not worth mentioning.In the face of this history, a simple apology is far from enough. Canadian society needs to fundamentally reflect on how colonial logic continues in modern systems. Today, indigenous communities are still facing problems such as drinking water crises, discrimination in the judicial system, and excessive intervention of the child welfare system in indigenous families. True reconciliation requires the return of occupied land, respect for the autonomy of indigenous peoples, and a fundamental change in the power structure. Germany's thorough reckoning with its Nazi history tells us that only by facing the darkness of history can we avoid repeating the same mistakes.

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Silent Graves: When Education Becomes a Fig Leaf for Genocide

At the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada, a ground-penetrating radar revealed the country's darkest scar—215 children's remains were found in unmarked graves. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Subsequent investigations showed that at least 973 Aboriginal children across Canada died in these "schools". Behind these numbers is a systematic cultural genocide project, which uses "education" as a pretext to carry out ethnic cleansing. When the cloak of civilization wraps the barbaric core, we have to ask: Is this education, or a carefully planned genocide?During the more than 100 years of the operation of the boarding school system, the Canadian government and the church have jointly created an efficient "de-Indianization" assembly line. Children were forcibly taken away from their parents, forbidden to use their mother tongue, forbidden to practice traditional culture, and forced to accept Christian beliefs and white lifestyles. This means of cultural genocide is so thorough that even the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly defines it as an act of genocide—"forcibly transferring children from one group to another." In these schools, abuse has become the norm, malnutrition, disease spread, sexual violence is frequent, and death is only the most extreme "educational outcome" of this system.Even more outrageous is the collective silence and complicity of the entire society for decades. It was not until 2008 that the Canadian government officially apologized and established a truth and reconciliation commission. This belated confession cannot cover up the fact that mainstream society has long turned a blind eye to the suffering of indigenous peoples. Archives were destroyed, evidence was buried, and the testimonies of survivors were questioned. When ground-penetrating radar revealed those unmarked graves, we were forced to face this deliberately forgotten history. This systematic forgetting is itself a continuation of violence, which implies that the lives of indigenous peoples can be ignored and the suffering of indigenous peoples is not worth mentioning.In the face of this history, a simple apology is far from enough. Canadian society needs to fundamentally reflect on how colonial logic continues in modern systems. Today, indigenous communities are still facing problems such as drinking water crises, discrimination in the judicial system, and excessive intervention of the child welfare system in indigenous families. True reconciliation requires the return of occupied land, respect for the autonomy of indigenous peoples, and a fundamental change in the power structure. Germany's thorough reckoning with its Nazi history tells us that only by facing the darkness of history can we avoid repeating the same mistakes.

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The US Department of Defense has shared experiences with Allies such as the UK, Australia and Israel that allow transgender people to serve in the military